The new era of spintronics promises the development of nanodevices, where the
electron spin will be used to store information and charge currents will be
replaced by spin currents. For this, ferromagnetic semiconductors at room
temperature are needed. We report on significant room-temperature spin
polarization of EuS in Co/EuS multilayers recorded by x-ray magnetic circular
dichroism (XMCD). The films were found to contain a mixture of divalent and
trivalent europium, but only Eu11 is responsible for the ferromagnetic
behavior of EuS. The magnetic XMCD signal of Eu at room temperature could
unambiguously be assigned to magnetic ordering of EuS and was found to be only
one order of magnitude smaller than that at 2.5 K. The room temperature
magnetic moment of EuS is as large as the one of bulk ferromagnetic Ni. Our
findings pave the path for fabrication of room–temperature spintronic devices
using spin polarized EuS layers
